Garo, or A∙chikku (as it is called among the natives), is a language spoken in India in the Garo Hills districts of Meghalaya, some parts of Assam, and in small pockets in Tripura. It is also spoken in certain areas of the neighbouring Bangladesh. According to the 2001 census, there are about 889,000 Garo speakers in India alone; another 130,000 is found in Bangladesh.

Contents

Garo belongs to the Bodo-Garo subgroup of the Sino-Tibetan, which includes Sinitic languages like Mandarin and Cantonese. The Bodo-Garo subgroup is one of the longest recognised and most coherent subgroups of the Sino-Tibetan language family.[3] This includes languages such as Bodo, Kokborok, Tiwa, Deuri, Garo, Rabha, Atong, Ruga, and Koch. Being closely related to each other, these languages have many features in common; and one can easily recognize the similarities even from a surface-level observation of a given data of words from these languages.

Towards the end of the 19th century, the American Baptist missionaries put the north-eastern dialect of Garo called A·we into writing, initially using the Bengali script. The reason for its selection out of many others was because the north-eastern region of Garo Hills was where rapid growth in the number of educated Garo people was taking place. Besides, the region was also where education was first imparted to the Garos. In course of time, the dialect became associated with educated culture. Today, a variant of the dialect can be heard among the speakers of Tura, a small town in the west-central part of Garo Hills, which is actually an Am·beng-speaking region. But with the migration of educated north-easterners to Tura due to the establishment of the political headquarters there, after Garo Hills came under the complete control of the British Government in 1873, the town saw a shift from its use of the native dialect to the dialect of the north-easterners. Tura also became the educational hub of Garo Hills, and in time a de facto standard developed from the north-eastern dialect (A·we) which gradually became associated with the town and the educated Garo speech everywhere ever since. As regards Garo orthography, basic Latin alphabet completely replaced the Bengali script only by 1924, although a Latin-based alphabet had already been developed by the American missionaries in 1902. The Latin-based Garo alphabet used today consists of 20 letters and a raised dot called “raka” (a symbol representing the glottal stop); the letters “f”, “q”, “v”, “x”, “y”, and “z” appear only in imported words. In Bangladesh, a variant of the Bengali script is still used alongside its Latin counterpart. Bengali and Assamese had been the mediums of instruction in educational institutions until 1924, and they have played a great role in the evolution of the modern Garo as we know today. As a result, many Bengali and Assamese words entered the Garo vocabulary. Since recently, there has also been a proliferation of English words entering the everyday Garo speech owing to media and the preference of English-medium schools over those conducted in the vernacular. Hindi is also making a slow but firm appearance in the language.

The Garo language comprises dialects such as A·we, Am·beng/A·beng, Matchi, Dual, Chisak, Ganching, and a few others. The speakers of these dialects can generally understand one another, although there are occasions where one who is unfamiliar with a dialect from another region requires explanation of certain words and expressions typical of that dialect. Research on the dialects of Garo, with the exception of A·we and Am·beng, is very much neglected; and many Garo dialects are being subsumed either the Standard or A·we or Am·beng. It should be noted that athough the de facto written and spoken standard grew out of A·we, they are not one and the same; there is marked variation in the intonation and the use of vocabulary between the two. It would be proper, therefore, to make a distinction between Standard A·we (spoken mainly in Tura) and Traditional A·we (still heard among the speakers in the north-eastern region of Garo Hills). There is also a great misconception among Garos regarding Atong, Ruga, and Me·gam. These languages are traditionally considered dialects of Garo. The speakers of Atong and Ruga languages are indeed Garos, ethnically; but their languages lack mutual intelligibility with the dialects of Garo and therefore linguistically distinct from the Garo language. Me∙gam (known to the Khasis as Lyngam/Lyngngam) is an Austroasiatic language closely related to Khasi. Since the Me∙gam speakers share a lot in common with the Garos culturally, the Garos misunderstand their language to be another dialect of their own.

Garo has been given the status of an associate official language (the main official being English) in the five Garo Hills districts of Meghalaya under the Meghalaya State Language Act, 2005.

The language is also used as the medium of instruction at the elementary stage in Government-run schools in the Garo Hills. Even at the secondary stage, in some schools, where English is the de jure medium of instruction, Garo is used alongside English — and sometimes even more than it — making the system more or less a bilingual one. In schools where English is the sole medium, Garo is taught only as a subject, as Modern Indian Language (M.I.L.). At the college level, students can opt for Garo Second Language (G.S.L.) besides the compulsory M.I.L. and even work towards a B.A. (Honours) in Garo.

In 1996, at the inception of its Tura campus, the North-Eastern Hill University established the Department of Garo, making it one of the first departments to be opened in the campus and “the only one of its kind in the world”. The department offers M.A. and Ph.D. programs in Garo.

Garo has been witnessing an immense growth in its printed literature lately. There has been an increase in the production of learning materials such as dictionaries, grammar and other text books, translated materials, newspapers, magazines and journals, novels, collection of short stories, folklores and myths, scholarly materials, and many important religious publications such as the Garo bible and the Garo hymnal. However, further research on the language itself has been slow – rather rare − but not non-existent.